A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician
is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere
matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern,
to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is
reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in
fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something
altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to
a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of
theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated
and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic
for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in
the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the
finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an
emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far
examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another
and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_
Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which
nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded
to is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it
is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind’s development we
shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at
which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its
most central contradiction.
SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.
§ 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as
_cognitive_: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical
category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the
_concrete_ mind.
Subjective mind is:—
(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul—the Spirit in _Nature_—the object
treated by _Anthropology_.
(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and
into other things: mind in correlation or particularisation:
consciousness—the object treated by the _Phenomenology of Mind_.
(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object
treated by _Psychology_.
In the Soul is the _awaking of Consciousness_: Consciousness sets itself
up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and
this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the
consciousness of its intelligent unity.